What Is the House Nut in a Concert Deal?

Every room has a number it must clear before a show has made anyone anything. Operators call it the nut, and it is one of the few pieces of live-music vocabulary whose meaning is stable across the business even though its contents are not. This page sets out what the nut commonly contains, why two rooms of the same size can have very different nuts, and how the figure connects to break-even and settlement.

Definition

The house nut is the venue's cost of opening for an event: the fixed expenses attributable to the night that must be recovered before there is any net to divide. A published booking glossary defines show expenses as a promoter's costs of promoting and presenting an event, listing venue rent, advertising, catering, insurance, security, stagehands, ticket takers and ushers, and ticketing and card fees, and it distinguishes variables — expenses that scale with tickets sold, such as performing-rights royalties as a percentage of gross receipts — and caps, the most a variable can reach for settlement ¹. The nut is the fixed subset of that list as the venue defines it. In a rental deal the nut is what the venue charges; in a co-promotion it is what the venue contributes; in a venue-promoted show it is the venue's own overhead allocated to the night.

What commonly sits inside it

The table on this page lists eight lines a nut is commonly said to include and how each is typically treated in a deal — fixed, per-ticket, percentage or capped. Rent or facility fee is the anchor. Labour is the largest variable-looking fixed cost: a stagehand call, security and front-of-house staffing are usually a minimum call with overtime on top. A production baseline covers the house sound, lights and backline the room supplies. Box office and ticketing costs are named as show costs in the glossary, though who bears them is a contract term. Insurance, permits, cleaning and utilities are fixed or per-event allocations, sometimes bundled into rent. A marketing minimum is a house advertising commitment. Catering and hospitality are listed as show costs and driven by the artist's rider.

The eighth line is the one to ask about. Some rooms build a promoter profit or house fee into the nut — a margin the venue takes regardless of how the night settles. There is nothing improper about it, but a buyer who does not know it is there will misread the room's break-even and misjudge every offer they make into it. A nut is a list of lines, and the list is a negotiating document.

Why the nut is deal-specific

Two venues of identical capacity can present the same show against very different nuts because they define the list differently: one bills ticketing fees separately, one includes them; one charges a flat production fee, one passes through actual labour; one treats catering as a reimbursable, one caps it. A nut quoted without its line items is therefore not comparable across rooms, and a buyer comparing offers should normalise the lists before comparing the totals. The offer sheet asks for estimated expenses line by line for exactly this reason.

The nut and break-even

The break-even calculator on this page, shared with the break-even guide, treats the nut as the fixed-expense input. In the worked scenario — 1,100 sellable at $35 face, $4 of per-ticket deductions, $2.50 of variable cost per head, $9,500 of fixed expenses and a $6,000 guarantee — each paid ticket contributes $28.50 towards the fixed bill, and the flat break-even lands at 544 tickets, a little under half the house. Every one of those inputs is illustrative. What the scenario shows is that the nut and the guarantee are additive: both must be cleared from the same contribution stream, and a room whose nut leaves no space for a competitive guarantee is a room that will struggle to book, however good the sound is.

What is not documented

No public source records the nut of any venue or the distribution of nuts across rooms of a given size. Rent cards are private, labour calls are negotiated and the treatment of each line is contractual. Claims of the form that a room of a given capacity costs a given amount to open are therefore unsupported, and this page makes none. Live Index's research on the independent promoter margin problem and its promoter economics reference describe the pressure a nut exerts without stating its size, because its size is not knowable from public evidence.